


choose your gods more carefully next time

by synchronized_strangers



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Disassociative Episodes, Folie a Deux, M/M, Murder, Psychological Trauma, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Psychopaths In Love, Season 2 AU, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-14
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2018-02-13 04:37:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2137224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synchronized_strangers/pseuds/synchronized_strangers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His strategy is perfectly brilliant, you see. He’s going to convince them he’s still Will Graham and then Will Graham is going to die.</p><p>He’s going to need her for that.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Patience, Will. A good hunter knows how to choose his moment.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	choose your gods more carefully next time

She’s not there when he gets home.

It’s not surprising. He isn’t expecting her to be. Not with Alana coming over every few days, Beverly taking him out to lunch every Sunday, Freddie Lounds still paying off his garbage men to let her paw through the bags for anything interesting.

His battle strategy is simple. As effective in what it fails to do as in what it does. He allows all of it. Every intrusion, every well and ill-intentioned disruption to the silence he dreams of so often he sometimes forgets it isn’t real.

No. That’s a lie. He never forgets. Not for one second. Not _ever_. Not even in the space between waking and dreaming.

 _Especially_ , Hannibal whispers, _in the space between waking and dreaming. Especially then._

It’s silence he longs for when Alana comes knocking. Always knocking. So careful not to overstep. Fiercely protective of the wall that Will has constructed to keep people out.

He wants to say, “Just come in. Please. This wall, it was never for you. It’s all right, Alana, come in. Come in.”

He doesn’t. He answers the door fully clothed even if he has to go get dressed first. Cloth is a kind of armor, he knows. That hideously blue jumpsuit might as well have been steel. In some ways he feels stripped to the bone without it, raw and stretched and on display in his denim and flannel. They are poor protection against the world. Poorer still against himself, but they are all he has now.

All he will _allow_. His camouflage must be absolute or it will fail.

His strategy is perfectly brilliant, you see. He’s going to convince them he’s still Will Graham and then Will Graham is going to die.

He’s going to need her for that.

_Patience, Will. A good hunter knows how to choose his moment._

+

There is an art to lying. It’s delicate, showing people what they expect to see because part of human nature is refusing to see what’s in front of you. Alana expects him to be broken but refuses to accept that he is beyond repair. Beverly expects contusions and refuses to treat him any differently because of them. Freddie expects nothing which makes her singularly difficult to bullshit, but she’s also prepared to accept anything so long as she can put it on display.

Will can work with that.

In fact, he can make _that_ work for _him_ , but only if he can just bring himself to do what’s necessary. The most difficult part of any plan is the execution.

There’s a gallows joke to be made there but sitting in his living room, Winston’s head on his knee, Will lets it go; sinks into a kind of meditation. He might not have a mind palace but there are places he can go when he needs to, spaces in his mind he discovered and expanded sitting in his cell.

He goes sailing sometimes when he can’t sleep, closes his eyes and unmoors himself until all he can see is blue. Sometimes he’s alone. More often Hannibal is there in a pair of bermuda shorts, white button down; wide-brimmed hat to keep off the sun. He exists there as easily as he did in his elegant home; trims the main sail just as expertly as he ever pared flesh.

“Why are you here?” WIll asked once, the question somehow not rude despite tone and diction.

Hannibal smiled. “Where else should I be?”

Will had laughed. “Behind bars seems like the obvious answer.”

“Come now, Will. You didn’t think a little thing like prison could keep me out of your head.”

Today the ocean is a flat calm, barely a ripple disturbing the perfect silence. Hannibal is not present. Not in evidence, rather. He’s always present.

The stillness is an omen, Will thinks, and a promise. There is an oppressive quality to the quiet and a heaviness that comes from being watched.

He’s been hunted often enough to recognize the feeling. The weight of it settles over him, through him, into his bones. It sits in his chest like so much muscle, carries something almost as vital.

“What are you feeling right this moment?” no one asks.

Because no one is asking, Will doesn’t answer but the words are there, ready, bubbling in his throat like breath or bile. If he opened his lips they would spill over, out of his chest, into the sea and that… that would feel like relief.

Destruction is a kind of catharsis.

Hannibal slithers a bit closer to the surface, slides his mind over and through Will’s, but doesn’t overwhelm. He is as ever unfailingly polite.

 _Careful, Will,_ he cautions, _what would Dr. Bloom say if she heard you thinking such thoughts?_

Alana can’t hear it, though. She never will. For all that she’s on Will’s mind she’s never been in it and he doesn’t think she’d be willing to even if she could. His mind is a labyrinth in every sense of the word and at the heart of it is a monster.

It might surprise her to know the monster isn’t Hannibal.

The memory of her face across the interrogation table floats to the surface. Fear and pain almost as naked in her gaze as they are in his. But under them -- planted within them -- there was a seed of recognition. Funny that he had to be wrongly accused for her to see him as he really was.

+

He’d imagined it would be Alana who held on the longest, clung the hardest. He’d envisioned having to yell, throw things, menace her with all the coiled power sitting quiescent on his bones.

In the end it only took a single word.

_The tongue is the strongest muscle in the human body. It’s only logical that language should be one of our most powerful weapons._

He’d said, “I don’t want you here. Telling me who I should be, what I should feel, how I used to act. You’re a reminder I don’t need of a past I will never overcome. Don’t come back, Alana.”

And then he’d said, “Please,” and he knew he’d won. If you can call it winning, wounding someone you might have loved so deeply that they can’t fight back.

Hannibal says nothing but even that is its own commendation. Will needs no coaching in this. He is every bit as ruthless as Hannibal ever could be. In some ways more so because the cost he pays is greater.

“There is no risk without reward,” he says, the words failing utterly to fill the space she left behind. Winston presses his nose into Will’s palm. The quiet presses down on him, full to bursting with all the futures he just discarded.

Empty still of the one he’s chosen, but it’s there, too. He can feel it coming like a storm. The scent of ozone and blood on the air. And soon -- very soon now -- there’ll be the scent of lavender, softly wafting off her skin.

She still makes her own lotions. Old habits.

_How better to honor her father’s memory than to adopt his self-sufficiency?_

It doesn’t particularly matter that her father’s dead. Will casts his shadow now, the feel of it lighter against the soles of his feet than he would have expected.

Although Will isn’t the only one bearing this particular burden. Hannibal is her father now, too.

He leaves Freddie to her poking. There’s no real harm in it. Nothing for her to find in his dirty laundry.

_Nothing relevant, at least. Abigail would be proud, Will._

Will doesn’t ask, “Are you proud?” Only partly because he already knows. In this, Will needs no validation. Hannibal did his work well.

 _Almost as well as you_ , he adds, and even to Will’s own mind, Hannibal sounds awed. _Too well, perhaps, if such a thing is possible_.

Will snorts indelicately, but has no desire to laugh when Hannibal asks, _Who do you suppose is keeping me company in my cell, Will?_

That night Will dreams of a palace with vaulted ceilings and dark corners, art and light working in perfect harmony to recreate the feeling of Hannibal’s mind. He dreams of finding a room somewhere near the center, small by comparison to the other spaces, but looming large in the mental landscape despite it. A room Will cannot stay out of or away from. A magnetic draw. True North. Will must enter. He must take his place. The pull of it is so much stronger than his will.

He enters, takes his usual seat and it isn’t until he allows himself to look up that he acknowledges what the room is. Where he has come.

Who he is with.

“I did not expect to find you here, Will, but I am grateful nonetheless you chose to come.”

His hands do not shake. He does not _allow_ them to shake but there is a trembling in his chest he can’t control. A wild, ecstatic feeling that he imagines used to motivate the maenads in their fits.

His hands clench and unclench arrhythmically against his knees. He longs to use them, to take Hannibal’s face in his palms and kiss it. To wrap his fingers around Hannibal’s throat and squeeze. To press into the flesh of his own eyes until he can see nothing but fractals beating in time with his heart.

Will swallows. “I’m not completely certain I did.”

Hannibal smiles and the feeling intensifies, a small supernova lodged in Will’s chest and he is still torn. Still fighting the dichotomous urges struggling to manifest.

The urge to worship. The urge to destroy.

No difference between the two, really. Not when they both expose his lie for what it is. Because regardless of which temptation wins, his path will always lead him here, to this.

To Hannibal.

“Please give Abigail my regards when she arrives.” Hannibal cocks his head slightly as if considering some internal clock. “That should be any day now, I expect. All that’s left is to finish what you started.”

Neither of them says her name, but there’s a black shadow in the corner past Hannibal’s shoulder, visible to Will from his current position only from the corner of his eye. She slips in and out of his periphery, there and not there in brief flashes.

Her black eyes accuse him of all the things he has yet to do.

“Please, invite your friend to sit.”

Will opens his eyes slowly. It’s been a long time since he startled awake from a dream. What would be the point? His life is no retreat from nightmares.

Winston whines, licks at Will’s fingers pleadingly, and more than anything Will regrets this. The loss of his own remaining innocence. Because there is no comfort here.

_All that is yet to come. You will find a comfort you can’t yet imagine once you embrace your nature. Once you come home._

Will rises to go feed the dogs. Losing all sense of morality hasn’t made him any less responsible. In this as in all things, he’ll see it through. Accept all consequences. If he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it his way. On his own terms.

“My eyes are open,” he says to the fields. To anyone or anything listening in the early fog.

To his daughter, maybe, wherever she is.

She probably hears it. Who can say how many people are living in her mind.

+

It isn’t elegant. There is nothing beautiful or transcendent. No relief. No redemption.

Will Graham murders Beverly Katz. He kills her. Strangles the life from her and then snaps her neck for good measure and there is no solace from the crime. It doesn’t even leave him feeling free.

Just hollow.

No, not hollow. Corrupt. He is full to brimming with the corruption in his soul.

Hannibal is conspicuously absent. He sits, folded into the tiniest space he can manage in the back of Will’s mind, and contributes nothing. Not a word or a thought or a feeling and stupidly, foolishly, Will feels bereft.

As if he has any right to the feeling. He deserves every ounce of suffering that could be meted out to him. Not that he’ll get it, so if this is what the universe has to offer him by way of punishment the least he can do is bear it without shirking.

For the first time in ages -- maybe the first time since he started letting Hannibal in -- Will puts up a wall between them; bricks Hannibal into his corner, folded up and tucked away like the good linens.

He can feel the quiet of the sea, waves lapping against the edges of his mind, beckoning him out. Away. _Away_. He could drift out to sea and float forever. Beverly could come with him, sailing out past the edge of the world.

“Here there be horrors indescribable,” Will whispered, brushing the hair from her eyes. Dead eyes thanks to him, and dead eyes can’t accuse.

It’s not surprising when the shadow falls over his shoulder to cover Beverly’s face and it’s almost like she’s there to shield the sight of his work from the eyes of God. The shroud over his monstrosity.

It’s been nearly two years and she’s still acting as the shield for her father’s crimes.

Will turns. Abigail looks down at him with her wide eyes. So clear. Like the stained glass of a cathedral.

She swallows but the waiver is gone from her voice when she speaks. There’s a hardness to her he doesn’t recognize, but it’s unmistakably Abigail.

He thought he’d be ashamed of himself, having her witness him like this but he was wrong. There’s no shame in her seeing him for what he is. No, the shame is in failing to live up to her expectations.

“This is sloppy,” she says, and Will nods, looking away. He can’t meet that gaze. Not when he’s caught between what he should have been -- tried to be, tried _so damned hard_ to become -- and what he is.

“We have to honor her.” And for Beverly he musters the courage to look up, to meet Abigail’s eyes because he needs her to understand how important this moment is. How blindingly, encompassingly important it is that they do this. Honor Beverly in the only way he can now, the only avenue he’s left open to himself and his choices. “We have to.”

He must manage to convey some measure of desperation because Abigail nods and just like that the hardness is gone. Vanished and in its place is a quavering vulnerability that made Will want to protect her once upon a time.

“We will,” she answers. “I’ll teach you.”


End file.
